Bartimaeus

I did not even realize that the developers had changed. The hell is Deck Nine? ...To be fair, it's not like Dontnod has the greatest track record either, but seriously, who the heck is Deck Nine? Some Square-Enix subsidiary? Wasn't Life Is Strange Dontnod's own IP?

My biggest gripes with how J.E. Sawyer designs games have been predominantly around making all aspects of combat (including things only indirectly related to combat) tedious as hell. ...So a game that takes all of that out and instead focuses on a cool idea in a unique setting? Yeah, I'm interested.

That is...not promising.

Bad and in-your-face writing is bad writing that's difficult to ignore, regardless of subject matter. What's that old saying, "act like you belong, and people will believe you"? Something like that. Most (though not all) media is still in that "we need to make a big deal out of it because it's new and important" stage, and I get why (...after an eternity of being ignored and/or shunned in media, and worse than that before media existed), but it sure doesn't make for enjoyable writing for myself personally. Media will get past it...eventually...probably...hopefully within our lifetimes, . I wouldn't like it if you took the same bad material and then inverted it to be about straight people, after all. In fact, toxic masculine characters (both male AND female) make me want to kill them just about anytime they appear in media, unless the writers are able to subvert, rationale, or otherwise use them in an interesting and satisfying way, which is pretty rare. Obnoxious is obnoxious is obnoxious. Anyways, that's...more or less the feeling that I got from looking at LiS3, that all subtlety as well as the atmosphere that I liked from the first game had gone straight out the window. I should probably give LiS2 a chance at some point - while I share your feeling in the premise not interesting me at all, the game at least looks more respectable in most other ways than LiS3.

I have not been able to muster up the motivation to try either LiS2 or LiS3 because they look a bit far off from what I liked about LiS1, although I have to say LiS3 looks like it misses the mark even more more than 2. I don't know if you're wrote about it on it before (if so, just link), but how does LiS2 compare to LiS1?

Surprised Nintendo doesn't mandate no turbo, since it could be quite unfair in some online games e.g. Mario Party. Doesn't look half bad, but be sure to let us know exactly how quickly it falls apart. https://www.amazon.com/10000mAh-Nintendo-YOBWIN-Portable-Extended/dp/B07QD5T6MJ Corrected your link, since yours wouldn't open.

Yeah, I read after that I apparently watched the "Director's Cut" version of the film. The "happier" theatrical cut ending seems almost seems even more subversive, because the "hero" gets away with several murders and lives happily ever after. Doesn't really strike me as right for obvious reasons, but in a horror black comedy musical, I could see it working as being an arguably even more screwed up way to resolve the story. Most likely, that wasn't what the film audience intended, though - dumb film audience gonna dumb film audience, I guess.

Little Shop of Horrors (1986). Uh, what? Final sequence with They didn't need to have that, but I (think I) am glad they did. Not one hundred percent sure it was needed from a plot standpoint, but it sure was fun to see the practical effects in action.

Samurai Champloo, episodes 13 and 14.

Only when everything else that remains is pure shonen. So...the gist of it is that the seinen anime gets less melodramatic and more shoujo-y after aging up the characters. Doesn't really make that much sense to me, but I guess that's okay, . Example #4719 of me being unsure if there's any truth to anything HoonDing says...

The Polish, uh, don't pull many punches with their posters, do they?

Is Drew Struzan the guy responsible for making all the "let's just throw all the characters into a giant hot mess a la Star Wars" posters? ...Yes, yes he is. Ugh. Okay, so I'm going to look real quick for some where he DIDN'T do that. It turns out, there weren't very many where he didn't do that, and most of them where he didn't were ultra cheesy in some other way, so this ended up being a very easy choice: The Thing. In retrospect, it's probably not necessarily his fault all his posters look the same, but more likely a function of the types of movies he's being hired to make posters for (i.e. big action/adventure movies that want a poster that "looks the same" as other successful action/adventure movies' posters in order to help sell it) and being "type-casted" into doing the same kind of poster over and over. I guess at least his posters are actual posters, unlike what we get today.

As I recall, I had my fingers in my ears and my eyes closed during most of the final act of Tales from Earthsea because of how deeply embarrassed and ashamed I was with the totality of that film. Of all the anime movies I've watched, including some pretty miserable ones like the final two Rebuild films but also some other misbegotten garbage that doesn't need to be mentioned, only the second Madoka film rated lower than Tales from Earthsea. Nausicaa was the very first anime film I watched (...two years ago now?) and it didn't even slightly make me want to pluck out my eyeballs and puncture my eardrums while watching it. In contrast, Tales from Earthsea was the very last Ghibli film that I chose to watch (outside of the recently released Earwig and the Witch*), both because of its horrid reputation as well as the fact that it was a shonen fantasy anime, so it was admittedly pretty predictable that I would utterly despise it**. Still, I am shook. *Which, for as much as I didn't like it and as kind of terrible as Earwig and the Witch was, I still liked a bit better than Tales from Earthsea. **Originally, I wasn't going to watch Tales from Earthsea, but I got roped into it along with Ghibli's more dubious Ocean Waves, but I actually surprisingly liked Ocean Waves...no dice for Tales from Earthsea. Anything that shoots down bad shonen is a winner in my books...uuunless it came out past 2000, in which case it's still inherently trash, .

e: shoulda watched samurai champloo

I think I remarked that was the only thing I even kind of liked from what I saw of the show, since it reminded me of 80s animation and less of modern-day anime like the rest of the show. A couple of the face close-ups I saw in that show in the ten or so minutes I watched of it were legitimately revolting to me, so the "can't speak" face was a hugely welcome contrast to that. Codename: Sailor V, episode 2:

I have not played any Final Fantasy games, . And it's not as though I am bigly into JRPGs - I've played a handful of S/NES-era ones, but that's about it. I've definitely never abused Ranger -> Cleric dual-classes before, no sir.

Don't know what a "white mage" is, so I guess I'm not really in on the latest JRPG tropes (latest true JRPG I've played for at least ten minutes is...ah, yes, MOTHER 3 on the Game Boy Advance), but pretty much everything about it the poster as a whole sure looks terrible very bad ungood I don't like it. If this is what is what modern JRPGs sell themselves as...

It sounds like they gave him a two year paid vacation as part of the settlement to avoid lawsuits, so at least there's that?

I wouldn't necessarily count on Samurai Champloo to play entirely by historical rules.

"There's bound to be some secrets about that sunflower dude written somewhere in there..." I'm not a hundred percent sure she ever said the sunflower samurai was a dude? But I'm not sure, maybe she did in like the first episode. Anyways, episode 12 was a clip show, but it was a pretty good clip show, since it was told through Fuu's diary and gave her thoughts and reflections on the events that have happened so far, as well as her frustrations with her companions.

Speaking of the next episode...Samurai Champloo, episode 11. It's a Jin episode, but, like...the real Jin, not the not-Jin I was calling Jin before.

Sakura, episode 64. Looks like we got ourselves a skiing episode, folks.

I was looking for evil laughing gifs until I read this. Pfeh. I was promised a disaster, and instead I get this? Guess it'll just have to wait until the next season...

I closed my eyes so I wouldn't be biased by the video itself, since I famously despise all things music videos which can bias me against the song, and the first few seconds I was like "hmm, this doesn't SEEM familiar...". Then she started singing, and I was like "oh yeah, the chipmunk girl". It's not the worst ever by any means, but I certainly don't care for it. Maybe if I fall in love with the show... Did you listen to the intro on every Sakura episode like I have? Maybe you need some more brainwashing...it seems to have worked on me, . I maintain that I can barely understand and practice English - Japanese is wholly out of the question except as it pertains to precisely one person: me.

It's fine. The opening lines are O.K., the middle part of the song immediately after that sucks because it slows to a crawl and the way the lady sings it is weird and it all sounds just kind of uneven and bad, but then the song finally kicks off when the Sakuras merge, and that part's pretty decent. Plus, seeing Sakura in the broken mirror turn towards the camera is pretty cool animation-wise. Yes, the Sailor Stars song is better, but so is the Sakura animation, . In other words, I don't have to worry about you finishing it before me, .